Amid the oil boom, fear

Residents near the Port of Albany say they dread the possibility of an oil train explosion

The summer party was in full swing at Ezra Prentice Homes, with the adults grilling hot dogs and burgers, the music thumping and kids playing basketball. Only a few yards away, on the other side of a flimsy chain-link fence, were what residents saw as uninvited interlopers — jet-black oil tanker rail cars, lined up by the dozens in a rail yard at the Port of Albany.

Mary Alston, who has lived in the city-owned housing project along South Pearl Street since 1989, was blunt. "If there is an explosion and anything happens to me," she said, "I want someone charged with first-degree murder."

Like it or not, Albany — with little initial fanfare — is part of a U.S. oil boom that began on New Year's Eve 2009, when the first train hauling crude oil rolled out of the Bakken fields of North Dakota some 1,800 miles away.

Now, two companies are using the Port of Albany to take in and unload massive oil trains of up to 100 tankers at a time that arrive daily and are a common sight lined up in the median and beneath the overpasses of Interstate 787 in the city's downtown.

Once there, tankers are either pumped out, with some oil taken down the Hudson River in barges and seagoing tankers to coastal refineries, or sent south to a Philadelphia refinery.

In industry parlance, Albany is a "midstream" facility, meaning it is a location for loading and unloading that falls between the oil fields and the ultimate destination of a refinery.

At the Ezra Prentice party, many residents said they live in fear of an accident or explosion, like the one that killed 47 people last summer in the small Quebec town of Lac-Megantic when an unattended oil train rolled away, derailed, exploded and unleashed a river of flaming oil.

That tragedy was a watershed moment that sparked a growing national debate over the safety of a rail system that has become a rolling pipeline for America's newest energy boom.

In 2008, as oil began to flow from North Dakota, a lack of pipelines in that part of the Midwest to take crude to coastal refineries presented a challenge to energy companies.

To solve it, they turned to a rail fleet of some 92,000 tank cars used to haul a variety of flammable liquids. These tankers, called DOT-111s, have been shown to be prone to rupture during a derailment, which can spill oil and spark explosions. The shipping industry is switching over to armored, sturdier versions, but old models still account for two-thirds of the current tanker fleet.

There is currently a $7 billion push to build thousands more of the tougher DOT-111s, saidRobert Simpson, president of the Railway Supply Institute, a group that represents the rail equipment industry.

"These tankers are not (Ford) Pintos on rails, nor are they rolling time bombs," said Simpson. But he said there is no way that a tanker — which weighs more than 140 tons when loaded with crude — can be made to withstand a 60-mile-per-hour crash like that at Lac-Megantic.

More tankers are needed because what started as a trickle from the Bakken field — nationwide, just 9,500 carloads of crude were shipped in 2008 — grew into a torrent, hitting 400,000 carloads in 2013.

Lac-Megantic was part of a spate of derailments — and, in some cases, explosions and fires — in North Dakota, Alabama, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and New York that raised concerns that an aging network of tracks and tanker cars may not be safe enough to head off another tragedy.

In the absence of the proposed XL pipeline, which would link the Bakken field to refineries in the Gulf Coast and which the Obama administration is under political pressure to reject, crude oil trains could be a long-term fixture in the Capital Region.

In a May report, the not-for-profit Oil Change International predicted that there will be more and more trains as the Bakken field expands. Currently, about 135 oil trains are on the rails somewhere in the U.S. on any given day from one of 188 loading and unloading terminals.

Expansions are planned at 33 existing terminals, and another 51 terminals are either under construction or in the planning stages, according to the report. When all are operating, as many as 675 oil trains could be in transit each day.

While expensive, train oil terminals are still much less costly compared to building new pipelines that go to only one place. A rail network can connect many places to take advantage of local market prices, the report said.

In the Bakken field, the local economy is booming, with a local Walmart offering starting clerks $17 per hour in a bid to attract scarce workers. Meanwhile, in 2013 there were 117 crude-by-rail spills in the U.S., up 10 times from the start of the Bakken boom in 2008.

"It's all about money, money, money. Nothing is being done about this," said Annie Ellis, a great-grandmother who has lived at Ezra Prentice since 1972. "An explosion would wipe (out) this entire community. I tell my family that if something happens, just get out and go to (South Pearl Street). If you don't see me, don't go back in to look."

Other people complained about strange noises and odors coming from the rail yard.

"I am scared. The noises go on all night, and it smells like gasoline sometimes. It hurts my throat," said Marquita Nolan, a married mother of three. "Could a thrown match just set it off?"

Because of its geographic location, with rail lines converging from all four directions and its access to the Hudson River, Albany has become a major oil shipping hub, which drew little public attention in the Capital Region when it began taking shape some five years ago.

That was when one of port's two oil companies, Massachusetts-based Global Partners, sought federal stimulus funding to expand its oil terminal. At that time, the Bakken boom was just beginning, pumping out about 8.4 million gallons a day, according to figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Fueled by hydraulic fracturing — or hydrofracking, a technique of high-pressure underground injection of chemicals, water and sand that is being hotly debated for natural gas exploration in New York — the Bakken oil gusher has since jumped to 42 million gallons daily, with as much as a quarter of that possibly heading to Albany.

For that to happen, the state DEC had to issue air pollution permits and determine whether oil shipments presented an environmental risk.

In 2011, DEC gave permission for Global to handle up to 450 million gallons a year of crude — the equivalent of 15,000 tanker cars each carrying about 30,000 gallons. DEC received no public comments on the plan.

In November 2012, DEC gave Global permission to increase its shipments to 1.8 billion gallons of crude a year — the equivalent of 60,000 tank cars, or an average of 164 cars a day, every day of the year. Again, DEC received no public comment on the plan.

A month after that approval, the oil freighter Stena Primorsk, making its maiden voyage down the Hudson River from Albany with 12 million gallons of Bakken crude, ran aground near Bethlehem, gashing open its hull. An inner hull remained intact and no oil was spilled, averting what could have been an environmental disaster for the Hudson.

In May 2013 — two months before the Lac-Megantic inferno — the port's other oil terminal operator, Houston-based Buckeye Partners, got DEC permission to boost crude imports from 400 million gallons annually to 1 billion gallons, or the equivalent of 91 tankers a day, every day of the year.

Buckeye and Global then had permission to haul 2.8 billion gallons of crude — equal to more than 250 loaded rail tankers every day of the year. And in granting permission for the needed permits, DEC said the oil surge posed no environmental threat.

Oil trains converge on Albany from two directions. They come from north, via Montreal on Canadian Pacific tracks that run along Lake Champlain and pass through many residential areas in the Capital Region at places like Waterford, Cohoes, Colonie and Menands. And the CSX freight line comes from the west, passing through Buffalo and Syracuse on its way to the Capital Region and the port. The trains continue through Albany County, through Ravena, on the way to the west shore of the Hudson River.

An official from CP, which was hauling crude to the Buckeye terminal, said two years ago that the company envisioned a "permanent role" for trains moving Bakken crude.

And the surge seemed poised to keep growing. In May 2013, Global sought another DEC permit, this time to build a facility to heat crude so it could be more easily pumped out of rail cars. That had led opponents to believe that Global planned to take not just Bakken crude, but Canadian tar sands oil, a much thicker, denser crude that needs to be heated in order to be pumped.

Global has neither confirmed nor denied that it is eyeing tar sands oil. In December 2013, the first rail terminal designed to load Canadian tar sands on tanker trains opened in Alberta, Canada.

And last year, Buckeye Partners announced plans to ship tar sands crude to a planned terminal in New Jersey, from where it could be shipped via tankers to a company terminal in the Bahamas for later delivery to international markets.

In Albany last summer and fall, environmental groups, Ezra Prentice residents and officials in Albany County began to question whether DEC was taking a hard enough look at oil train safety and urged the state to further scrutinize Global's proposed expansion. DEC began demanding more information from Global and public comments on the project began streaming in. DEC has extended the public comment period three times so far, and is now taking comments through Aug. 1, and had said it might rescind its earlier ruling that the project would not have a significant environmental impact, a step that would force Global to conduct a detailed environmental review.

The state Department of Transportation conducted several high-profile inspections at crude-oil yards at the port. Federal rules regulate track and freight train standards, but state DOT assists with its own inspectors to check about 3,500 miles of freight rail track in the state.

From about 6,500 miles in 2000, track inspections by the state had sunk to a low of about 3,200 total track miles by the time the Bakken boom started in 2008, according to figures from the DOT Rail Safety Bureau. That rebounded to nearly 6,000 miles of track inspections by 2012, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Increased inspections found more defects in tracks; about 380 defects were found in 2008, and by 2012, that had shot up threefold to nearly 1,300 defects.

However, inspectors were not looking at as many rail cars or critical equipment like brakes. In 2008, about 9,400 freight car inspections found 231 to be defective in some way; by 2012, that had slumped to about 3,150 freight car inspections that found just 50 to be defective, according to state figures,

During that same five-year period, brake inspections fell from 350 to 148, with total brake defects found dropping from 398 to 165.

Figures provided by DOT do not indicate the location of such inspections, or the rail companies involved. Such data are compiled on behalf of the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration and submitted to that agency.

A state DOT spokesman declined to release the data to the Times Union, saying while it was collected at state taxpayer expense, it was federally controlled. The FRA has not yet provided the Times Union with the data sought under a federal Freedom of Information Act request.

On July 1, amid mounting concerns that states did not know enough about the oil trains passing through, federal emergency rules required that oil train operators file reports with state emergency officials detailing the routes, nature of the crude and scheduling of such shipments.

CSX sought to have state officials in New York and elsewhere sign confidentiality agreements to get the reports, but federal officials said the records were not considered confidential under federal rules.

The state Office of Homeland Security has reports from both CSX and Canadian Pacific, and is still weighing how the records might be released, said state spokesman Peter Cutler. Some of the records could be withheld if state officials feel that their release could pose security risks, he said.

Back at Ezra Prentice, Ellis knows about risks. "I know what happened to those people up in Canada and my heart goes out to them," she said.

"If something like that happened here, every building you see could be gone. We have not been shown how we are supposed to evacuate if something does happen. I don't understand why the Albany Housing Authority would allow their tenants to be in such danger. These trains should not be allowed in residential areas."

There are at least 30 elderly and infirm people in the complex who have mobility issues and would have to be helped to evacuate, said Ezra Prentice Tenants Association President Charlene Benton, herself in a powered wheelchair.

PAUSE is a grassroots group of individuals who have come together to promote safe, sustainable energy and fight for environmental justice. We engage the greater public to stop the fossil fuel industry’s assault on the people of Albany and our environment.